He has taken on the darkest aspects of American politics in JFK and Nixon, and plumbed the horrors of war in Born on the Fourth of July and Platoon. So Oliver Stone may be just the director to explore the improbable rise and catastrophic fall of his onetime Yale contemporary George W. Bush. In his new movie, W., Stone has said, he sought to answer the question “How did Bush go from an alcoholic bum to the most powerful figure in the world?” With a screenplay by Stone’s Wall Street collaborator, Stanley Weiser, W. stars Josh Brolin as the 43rd president and Richard Dreyfuss as Dick Cheney (posed here with other members of the cast in an echo of V.F.’s cover photo of Bush’s war cabinet in 2002) in a tragicomedy of family dynamics and geopolitics that Stone envisions in the mold of Network or Dr. Strangelove. He says he sought a “fair, true portrait of the man,” one with surprises for both Bush supporters and Bush-haters; the film is scheduled for release from Lionsgate late this month, just in time for the election.

Like most of Stone’s films, the project has been controversial (Robert Duvall turned down an entreaty to play Cheney, Brolin was reluctant at first, and various studios shied away). But as the American cinema’s reigning conspiracy theorist, Stone—who served in Vietnam, unlike the president—has singular standing to reimagine a chief executive whose actual over-the-top actions have sometimes managed to make even the wildest conspiracy theories seem tame.